DESUS AND MERO’S COLD OPEN
Daniel Baker and Joel Martinez
COMPANY Showtime
POSITION Talk-show hosts
EARLY JOBS
DB Columnist for Black Enterprise magazine
JM Middle-school teaching assistant
BRONX NATIVES DANIEL BAKER (DESUS NICE) AND JOEL MARTINEZ (THE KID MERO) met in high school. After honing their rapid-fire cultural commentary on Twitter, Baker, a former small-business columnist, and Martinez, a onetime public-school teacher, parlayed their viral popularity into a podcast on Complex before adding TV, first with an ill-fitting stint at MTV2 and then with a hit nightly show on Viceland. Now, the sons of Jamaican and Latino immigrants, respectively, are working with a writers’ room for the first time and translating their off-the-cuff humor for a broader audience with the seven-month-old Desus and Mero.
I think the perfect late-night show would be something I could show to my parents, on Adult Swim. The problem with [most] late-night television now is you have to reach a certain [level of fame] in order to be invited on [as a guest]. They’re behind the curve: We’re going to have this person on because we see that you guys liked this and we don’t have any feelers on the ground. Whereas we’re in tune with the culture. We have our ear to the streets and we know things way before it’s in the zeitgeist for other people. If you’re just picking up on something after it’s already hit mainstream, you seem antiquated, like, “Hey, fellow kids.” It should be conversational. It should feel natural and not just like, you know, “Rim shot, here’s so-and-so, blah blah blah.” It should be more like , [which was] super lo-fi and you would occasionally hear the crew laughing. Also, I want to see somebody who might not necessarily come from where I come from, but who is in tune with what I’m in tune with and makes me feel like I’m a part of it.
